Starting to Settle in

We are successfully moved in! It's bitterly cold and snowed all day Friday. But we (and more than half a dozen friends) managed to move a load of furniture Friday night and then again Saturday morning too. I'm so glad we had the kids go to St. Louis. Friday night after the first load of furniture went, we started dismantling the bunk beds to make Saturday morning go more smoothly. That really helped. By the time the kids got home Sunday evening, we had their rooms put together. Kathy spent hours here on Saturday, helping me get the kitchen unpacked. And now is fully functional!

I keep moving furniture around, from room to room, spot to spot. And there are an insane number of boxes in our corner of the basement. We'll continue to chip away at them box by box, week by week.

Work on the old house started on Monday. There are a lot of work men there, and I'm stopping in each morning after I drop the kids at school, to take a look at the progress. We're making a lot of cosmetic changes. When it's all done, it's going to look so different. Hopefully that will help me walk away from this house without too many tears.

When our real estate agent walked through back in November, he said, buyers don't want to do anything. Gone are the days when you can provide a carpeting or paint allowance, or even drop the price. They want the ultimate move in ready home. Our house had none of that. The carpeting needed to be replaced years ago. The kitchen floor ... well you remember. And then there are all the beautiful painting projects we've done in the kids bedrooms and in the dining room and basement. Apparently, rose pink, cornflower blue checks, confederate red, and deep ocean blue aren't huge selling points. I'm going to miss those walls!

We need the house to sell fast, we can't afford to let the house sit for a long period of time. So we're having the carpeting replaced, the kitchen floor & counter top replaced, the tile around the fireplace replaced (thanks to a chipped tile), and the entire house painted four different shades of beige. Unfortunately for us, the windows are horrific and poorly constructed (most of the small pieces that allow the window to open to the inside to be cleaned have broken) we're replacing those too. We're praying that this investment will pay off when the house goes on the market next week.